Home/ Questions/Q 8534261
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-11T10:09:11+00:00

The following code works with some wav files, but with others I get, InvalidOperationException

  • 0

The following code works with some wav files, but with others I get, “InvalidOperationException was unhandled. Message=Sound API only supports playing PCM wave files.”

var webClient = new WebClient();
webClient.DownloadFile(url, fileName);
var fileSound = new SoundPlayer(fileName);
fileSound.PlaySync();

Is there a way to programmatically check if a wav file is “bad” (not a PCM wave file) and then convert it as necessary?

What is odd is that the code works in the legacy Delphi app – all of the wav files play just fine. Here’s the Delphi code:

filename := GetEnvironmentVariable('TEMP')+'\archieAndDingbat.wav';
URLDownloadToFile(nil, PChar(url), PChar(filename), 0, nil);
PlaySound(filename);

I looked at the properties of the two files in Explorer, and I see that there is, indeed, a difference. For the file that does play, its audio format is PCM; the one that won’t play is CCITT u-Law.

So…I either need a way to convert from CCITT u-Law to PCM on the fly after downloading these files (they are download from an url and then played locally) OR perhaps a different way of playing these files than PlaySync() …

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The way to do it is to use newkie’s code at: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/175030/PlaySound-A-Better-Way-to-Play-Wav-Files-in-C?msg=4366037#xx4366037xx

    In my case, at least, I had to change all of the lowercase x’s to uppercase x’s, though, to get it to work.

    • 0